English Language & Usage Asked on January 4, 2021
Consider these sentences:
In (1) for her is a prepositional phrase. Is this instance of for her
an adjectival prepositional phrase or an adverbial prepositional phrase? Or
is calling it either of those still okay no matter which you choose?
In (2), for Anne is a prepositional phrase. Same question here: Is for
Anne an adjectival prepositional phrase or is it an adverbial
prepositional phrase? Or are both choices correct?
Do those two sentences mean the same thing as these two respectively mean? Here instead of a prepositional phrase, an indirect object is used instead.
If (3) and (4) mean the same thing as (1) and (2), would that alter whether
the prepositional phrases in the first pair should be analysed as adjectival or adverbial
modifying phrases?
If rephrased this way, then both can be adverbial as they modify the whole sentence. They can be adverbial in nature, too, if you replaced them with an adverb like "tomorrow".
I think it ultimately doesn't make a difference. HOW it functions and what part of speech it is are two different things. They are prepositional, no matter what, even if their function is adverbial. That's how I see it.
Answered by Lucidity of Power on January 4, 2021
Both are ambiguous:
But in both cases, the ambiguity is mostly theoretical; we could contrive a situation where the party's honoree is not the person for whose benefit we're actually throwing it, or where the recipient of the flowers is not the person for whose benefit we're getting them ("These roses are for my boss's wife. He sent me to get them for him from the florist and deliver them to her"), but in most cases the real-world meaning of the sentence is the same under either parse, such that the ambiguity is unlikely to be noticed.
Answered by ruakh on January 4, 2021
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